Handheld electronic devices with touch-sensitive displays are ubiquitous. While these devices were originally designed for information consumption (e.g., web-browsing) and communication (e.g., email), they are rapidly replacing desktop and laptop computers as users' primary computing devices. Users of desktop or laptop computers, however, routinely multitask by swapping between running applications (e.g., cutting-and-pasting text from a document into an email). While there has been tremendous growth in the scope of new features and applications for handheld electronic devices, the ability to multitask and swap between applications on handheld electronic devices requires entirely different input mechanisms than those of desktop or laptop computers.
Moreover, the need for multitasking is particularly acute on handheld electronic devices, as they have smaller screens than traditional desktop and laptop computers. Some conventional handheld electronic devices attempt to address this need by recreating the desktop computer interface on the handheld electronic device. These attempted solutions, however, fail to take into account: (i) the significant differences in screen size between desktop computers and handled electronic devices, and (ii) the significant differences between keyboard and mouse interaction of desktop computers and those of touch and gesture inputs of handled electronic devices with touch-sensitive displays. Other attempted solutions require complex input sequences and menu hierarchies that are even less user-friendly than those provided on desktop or laptop computers. As such, it is desirable to provide an intuitive and easy-to-use system and method for simultaneously accessing multiple functions or applications on handheld electronic devices.